ON THE WSWS
Donate to
the WSWS!

News Feed
Contact the
WSWS
Editorial Board
New Today
News & Analysis
Workers Struggles
Arts Review
History
Science
Polemics
Philosophy
Correspondence
Archive
About WSWS
About the ICFI
Help
Books Online

OTHER
LANGUAGES
German
French
Italian
Russian
Polish
Czech
Serbo-Croatian
Spanish
Portuguese
Turkish
Sinhala-
Tamil
Indonesian

LEAFLETS
Download in
PDF format

An exchange of letters
on the BBC documentary Lenin’s Secret Files

6 March 1998

The following is an exchange of letters between Chris Marsden of the Socialist Equality Party in Britain and the producers of the Timewatch TV documentary Lenin’s Secret Files, broadcast December 2, 1997 on BBC2.

The first letter, a protest against the historical falsifications contained in the film, was sent by Marsden last December 10 to the series editor Laurence Rees and the BBC Programme Complaints Unit. The producer of the documentary, William Cran, sent a reply to Marsden this past January. The final letter is Marsden’s response to Cran.

* * *

December 10, 1997
Laurence Rees
Commissioning editor, Timewatch
Television Centre
Wood Lane, Shepherds Bush
London, W12 7RJ

Dear Mr. Rees,

I am writing to condemn the Timewatch documentary Lenin's Secret Files for its falsification of historical fact and crude anticommunism.

The programme, broadcast on BBC2 on December 2, was allegedly based on material from the Lenin Archives in Moscow, which had been closed for the past 80 years.

The programme makers claimed they would provide a new and unique insight into one of the greatest personalities of the twentieth century. Instead they served up an undisguised piece of propaganda which, even by the usually low standards of such fare, was extremely crude. In commissioning it, BBC2 has abandoned any claim to scientific rigour in its approach to historical questions.

Soviet expert Robert Service spent weeks in the archives. He admitted that his aim was to present Lenin "in a new light—darker and more violent." This is hardly the basis for conducting objective historical research. It was Service's political prejudices that determined the programme's conclusions, and not anything revealed by the archives.

Not one shred of archival evidence was produced to substantiate the claim that Lenin was a violent, obsessive and disturbed man and the Russian Revolution was the product of his "diseased brain." Instead the viewer was asked to accept gross slanders as fact.

While the programme makers claimed to have insight into the state of Lenin's mind, not one reference was made to the over 40 volumes of his writings, which surely give a better indication of his thinking.

The case against Lenin hinged on such flimsy material as a call for 100 kulaks to be hung for withholding grain, as an example to others. The programme concluded that this proved Lenin was indifferent to human suffering.

It was not explained that the civil war resulted from the efforts of the counter-revolutionary armies and their imperialist backers to destroy the revolution through force of arms. As supporters of the counter-revolution, the rich peasant kulaks withheld grain as a means of starving the cities and preserving their profits. This was at a time when millions were dying of starvation, in what Lenin described as an "agonising famine." Lenin's concern was to overcome this truly terrible situation of mass human suffering that was also gripping the vast majority of the peasantry.

The atrocities committed by the White Armies were only acknowledged in order to claim, "atrocity begat atrocity … while millions perished Lenin continued to justify the Red Terror."

More is at stake, however, than a slanted interpretation of events. The programme descended into outright falsification.

Graphic film was used as evidence of the "Red Terror." An officer was shown posing beside severed heads, soldiers being shot by firing squad, their bodies falling into a freshly dug grave. "All this is terrible and certainly does change the image that had been hammered into our heads," said former Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev.

The truth is the opposite. Every film sequence used in the programme actually depicted the White Terror and not the Red.

The photo of the severed heads appears in the Yorkshire Television series and accompanying book Red Empire—the Forbidden History of the USSR, by Gwyneth Hughes and Simon Welfare. It is captioned in the book, "Officers under the command of White General Alexander Kolchak examine the spoils of war."

The classic documentary From Tsar to Lenin by Herman Axelbank utilises the same pictures of Red soldiers being killed by Kolchak's firing squads. The narrator explains, "Kolchak's army was capturing soviet soldiers by the thousands. 'Civil war has to be ruthless,' said Kolchak to his minister…. 'I give orders to my officers to shoot all communist prisoners.’"

In contrast, Leon Trotsky, then head of the Red Army and in charge of the defence of Petrograd, issued an order stating: "Woe to the unworthy soldier who raises his knife over a defenceless prisoner or deserter."

In their indecent haste to slander Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the programme's makers were indifferent to such details. Their political objective is clear—to present the Stalinist dictatorship as the necessary end product of the "bloody crimes" of the Bolshevik revolution.

The BBC, though hardly sympathetic to socialism, has in the past produced interesting and worthwhile programmes on history. Why, then, do they see fit to scrape the bottom of the barrel with this shoddy piece of work?

A comment made in the documentary provides an insight. Professor Vitaly Stasev states, "The course of political history would have been completely different if Lenin had succeeded in removing Stalin." This admission—damning from the standpoint of the programme makers and anticommunists in general—was passed over without comment or further illumination.

The documentary was forced, in its closing sections, to deal with Stalin's accession to power and the way he used the party apparatus to isolate the grievously ill Lenin. It also referred to "Lenin's Testament," in which he described Stalin as "too rude" and called for his removal as general secretary. Again there was no attempt to explain this, outside of noting Stalin's rudeness towards Lenin's wife Krupskaya.

It is a matter of historical record that at this time Lenin was becoming increasingly concerned at the growth of bureaucratism within the party and the state and forged an alliance with Leon Trotsky to fight it. The development of this struggle was only prevented by Lenin's death.

This is the real reason why the archives were kept closed for decades. They were not being protected from the Western powers, but from the Soviet people. The Stalinist bureaucracy were mortally afraid that unrestricted access to Lenin's work would demonstrate his opposition to Stalin and his support for a joint struggle with Trotsky.

It was not only the Stalinist bureaucracy that rested on the false equation of Leninism and Stalinism. For decades, capitalist politicians and anticommunist academics have maintained the same amalgam. Its purpose is to rubbish socialism and, especially following the collapse of the USSR, trumpet the superiority of the market system. With the opening of the archives the methods may have changed, but the aim remains the same.

It seems that the BBC is now intent on abandoning all standards of objectivity in furtherance of this campaign to proclaim the "death of socialism." It is up to discerning viewers, together with honest historians and intellectuals, to ensure they do not get away with this. A retraction and apology are clearly in order.

Yours sincerely,
Christopher Marsden,
for the Socialist Equality Party

* * *

12th January 1998

Christopher Marsden
Socialist Equality Party
P0 Box 71
Rotherham
S60 1SU

Dear Mr Marsden,

As the producer of the Timewatch documentary about Lenin's Secret Files your letter of complaint has been passed on to me. Before attempting to answer your specific criticisms, I would like to make a few general comments.

First of all, I do not accept that the film denies the greatness or importance of Lenin. The first few minutes of the programme are spent in "building him up" and include interviews with two prominent Party loyalists, Yevgeniya Shister and Olga Ulyanova. Their statements in support of Lenin are left unchallenged. Furthermore the beginning and the end of the film contain substantial sequences showing hundreds and thousands of ordinary Russians mourning Lenin's death. This impression is strengthened by the fond recollections of villagers from Gorky.

The film goes out of its way to emphasise the extraordinary impact this one man had on the history of the century. A quote from our interview with Neil Harding says: "The first world war was a turning point. He was almost unique in proclaiming the slogan 'turn your guns not against your fellow workers, but against your bourgeois enemies.’" In describing the events that led to the October revolution the narration, which I wrote, states that "In one respect at least myth and reality do coincide. It was the force of Lenin's ideas and personality that brought about the revolution." This claim is bolstered by quotes from the Russian historian Roy Medvedev, himself a convinced Leninist.

The premise of the programme is that Lenin was such a significant personality, that any new information, which influences our interpretation of his career or of his character is important. And the broad aim of this programme was to concentrate on new information which has been emerging from the Central Party Archives. This information has only begun to seep out in the last five years or so. The programme's advisor, Professor Robert Service, has played his part in this process.

In your letter you state that "Soviet expert Robert Service admitted that his aim was to present Lenin in a new light—darker and more violent." You then go on to argue that this is no basis for conducting objective historical research. But Robert Service makes no such statement about his aims, political or otherwise. I have reviewed the entire programme and cannot find anywhere where he admits to such a bias. What he does say is that new evidence in the archives helps us to "understand properly the whole psychological support system that was available to Lenin." In other words we now know more about Lenin as a human being.

In your next paragraph you criticise the programme for saying that the Russian revolution was the product of Lenin's "diseased brain." You should note that the phrase "diseased brain" does not appear anywhere in the programme. More importantly, it seems to me that you miss the point that Robert Service is trying to make. We now know that Lenin knew he had something wrong with his brain and that he had been told by Swiss specialists and even an old Russian peasant that he might not live for very long. The archives show that in conversations with his doctors he told them that great revolutionaries (and he obviously included himself in that company) generally died young. All this raises the possibility that Lenin alone among his Bolshevik comrades had a strong personal motive for forcing the pace of revolution. Robert Service says: "He knew that he had to cram into his revolutionary career as much as possible into as small a time-frame as possible. He was running his politics against the clock of his biology. He knew that he might die one day. Far too soon." Far from seeing this as derogatory it seems to me that this makes Lenin an even more heroic figure.

You also state that the viewer was asked to accept gross slanders about Lenin as fact, when not one shred of archival evidence was produced to substantiate claims that Lenin was violent, obsessive and disturbed. In point of fact we never say that Lenin was disturbed. As to his violence (i.e. against the kulaks) and his obsessiveness (i.e. tidy desk, sharp pencils) the evidence exists in documents and files, written in Lenin's own hand, which have been kept in the Central Party Archives. These and numerous other, newly released documents from the Lenin archives have been published by Yale University Press under the title of "The Unknown Lenin: from the secret archive."

If I understand your letter correctly, you seem to think that the public, mass execution of kulaks, for allegedly hoarding grain, was morally justifiable. In fact you refer to this as "flimsy material." In my opinion, most viewers would probably disagree with you on the grounds that no end could justify such means. However, this is not an argument that I sought to pursue in the film or in this correspondence.

The real significance of Lenin's order to hang a hundred kulaks is that it provides new insight into his character and his way of thinking. There is abundant evidence in the 40 volumes of Lenin's writing that he, like Stalin, believed that "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." It is a well established fact that Lenin made a special study of the Jacobin terror and advocated the use of terror, if it helped the cause of the revolution. But it is one thing to write about the theory of terror and quite another (sic) put it into actual practise. Orders like the one to hang the kulaks show that Lenin was prepared to get blood on his hands. And this new information has led people to reinterpret Lenin. Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Leninist and a former member of the Politburo, makes this quite clear when he says: "Some people in our country have revised their judgement of Lenin solely on the basis of new documents which illustrate Lenin's brutality. It certainly does change the image, which in the past has been hammered into our heads."

I do not deny that, when it comes to this darker side of Lenin's character and career, the film is critical of the man. However, we do not try to paint him as a crude monster. His love for Inessa Armand and his grief at her death shows a more sensitive and human side of Lenin. So too does his love of Beethoven, which he forced himself to give up because "it stopped him thinking … about the terrible nature of the world and the terrible things you had to do in order to turn it into a beautiful world."

Your most serious accusation against the programme is that we resort to "outright falsification" in the sequence depicting the horrors of the civil war. I have looked at this sequence several times trying to understand why you feel justified in accusing us of fabrication. In my opinion, we have carefully scripted these paragraphs precisely to avoid attributing White atrocities to the Reds.

I will go through your points one by one:

24'52" The commentary line "White Russian counterrevolutionaries and their foreign allies" goes over a wide shot of Japanese army officers with corpses at their feet.

24'57" The commentary line "atrocity begat atrocity" starts over the wide shot of Japanese officers and finishes over the shot of an army officer with severed heads. The commentary does not specifically attribute this atrocity to the Reds. In fact, the commentary hits the pictures in a way to suggest that it was the White terror that started the ball rolling.

25'34" There is no commentary at all over the shot of the firing squad.

25'40" The commentary line "remote from all the suffering" goes over a shot of corpses in a mass grave and clearly refers to the suffering on both sides.

The overall intention of the 72-second sequence is to illustrate the horrors of a gruesome civil war, in which both sides committed numerous atrocities. I think, with all due respect, that you ought to take a second look at the film, because we were very careful how we labelled the pictures and film clips that illustrated this section.

I completely agree with you when you say that the real reason the archives have been kept closed was the Stalinist bureaucracy's desire to keep the Soviet people in the dark about Lenin's real view about Stalin. But I am genuinely puzzled by what you have to say about our treatment of the deteriorating relationship between Lenin and Stalin. I am familiar with Lenin's concern about the growth of bureaucraticsm and his alliance with Trotsky. However, this is old news. What is new is the story of how Stalin spied on Lenin and made him a virtual prisoner in Gorky.

As to your more substantial point, historians will argue for ever as to whether or not Stalin was the inevitable consequence of Lenin and therefore, in every sense, his true heir. In fact, this is the view that Robert Service personally favours. In my opinion, given even the worst possible interpretation of Lenin, it is impossible to imagine anybody equalling or surpassing the crimes of Joseph Stalin. That is precisely why I included the Startsev quote about how "the course of political history would have been completely different if Lenin had succeeded in removing Stalin." I don't see Startsev's quote as "damning to the standpoint of the programme makers," because neither I nor Robert Service have the kind of ideologically motivated approach of which you accuse us.

If you will forgive me for saying so, much of your letter seems to attribute the worst possible motives to the programme, to Robert Service or myself. In my answers to your criticisms I have tried to show that we were being less critical and more even-handed than you have given us credit for.

Yours Sincerely
William Cran

* * *

March 4, 1998

William Cran,
Timewatch,
InVision Productions Ltd.
8, Barb Mews,
London W6 7PA

Dear Mr. Cran,

My apologies for the delay in responding to your January 12 reply to my letter of complaint regarding the Timewatch documentary, Lenin's Secret Files. Though I maintain my criticisms of your programme, both factual and political, you raise important questions that are worthy of careful consideration.

I do not believe, however, that you have satisfactorily answered the factual errors I noted in your documentary. You say you were even-handed in the section of the programme that shows civil war atrocities, and that you "carefully scripted these paragraphs precisely to avoid attributing White atrocities to the Reds." You add , "we were very careful how we labelled the pictures and film clips that illustrated this section."

I disagree. Every shot you used depicted atrocities carried out by the Whites, as I said in my original letter. Your only rebuttal is that the army officer shown amidst severed heads is not identified as a Red. True enough, but more to the point, he is not identified as a White.

And even were it clear that the aforementioned officer was with the Whites, the next series of images and narrative are so contrived as to lead to the conclusion that they show a Red atrocity. The commentary declares "atrocity begat atrocity," and what you refer to as "the firing squad" scene appears. But, once again, the scene shows White guards shooting Red Army prisoners.

I will allow that this presentation—confusing at best, misleading at worst—is not the result of malicious intent. But neither is it a purely innocent mistake. Rather it flows from the underlying assumptions which provided the axis of your presentation.

With the opening of the archives in Moscow, a wealth of new material has become available that can deepen our understanding of Lenin and the October 1917 Revolution. That you understood this is to your credit. But the fact remains that the majority of factual material "uncovered" by Professor Robert Service was already in the public domain. That he did not reveal anything of real substance is bound up with his own political preconceptions, which you did not challenge.

You admit that Robert Service favours the view that "Stalin was the inevitable consequence of Lenin." Surely you must acknowledge that such a standpoint is not incidental to the material he chose to highlight from the archives.

You point out that Professor Service did not say his aim was "to present Lenin in a new light—darker and more violent." Nevertheless the voice-over did say, "the secret archives have revealed a crueller and more violent side to Lenin's character." Lenin is described variously as "obsessive," "brutal," "cruel" and "ruthless"—a man for whom the number of people killed was "mere statistics."

It is true that the precise phrase "diseased brain" is not used. But you cannot deny that a central premise of the documentary was the claim that Lenin was suffering from an incurable brain impairment.

The film begins with a revolving image of a brain in a glass jar, supposedly that of Lenin, accompanied by voices whispering: "This brain is severely damaged." What was the purpose of this scene, if not to suggest that Lenin was a damaged individual?

Service states, "one has to consider the possibility that Lenin's medical condition produced moods of elation, positive moods, followed by very deep depression." The voice-over develops this theme: "The violent mood swings caused by Lenin's brain condition may have influenced the ruthlessness and cruelty with which the Communist regime was established."

I would like to touch on a question even more basic than the film’s distorted presentation of Lenin. Service asserts that Lenin was "running his politics against the clock of his biology." This implies that revolutions can be produced virtually at will.

Such a conception was completely alien to Lenin. His political development as a Marxist proceeded through a thorough critique and rejection of the subjectivist approach to history and anarchistic political views of movements like the "People's Will." Lenin understood that revolutions are the product of complex objective developments rooted in the contradictions of class society.

While under certain conditions the thought and action of individuals can play a tremendous and even decisive role in determining the outcome of great social struggles, individuals and parties cannot summon up revolutions at will. Indeed, the extent to which a revolutionary leadership in modern times is able to carry out the program of the socialist reconstruction of society is bound up directly with the depth of its grasp of the objective tendencies of historical development. In general terms, the conception of social revolution as an objective historical phenomenon is not limited to Marxists. It is shared by serious bourgeois historians and interpreters of the Russian Revolution, such as E. H. Carr.

Professor Steve Smith, who appears in your documentary, has written:

"The Bolsheviks themselves did not create popular discontent or revolutionary feeling. This grew out of the masses' own experience of complex economic and social upheavals and political events. The contribution of the Bolsheviks was rather to shape workers' understanding of the social dynamic of the revolution and to foster an awareness of how the urgent problems of daily life related to the broader social and political order. The Bolsheviks won support because their analysis and proposed solutions seemed to make sense" (Daniel H. Kaiser, ed., The Workers Revolution in Russia 1917: The View From Below, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 77).

You say that in the film you did not seek to pursue the argument about whether Lenin's treatment of the kulaks (rich peasants) was morally justified, but this is hardly necessary given the programme's assertion that Lenin's "violent mood swings" were possibly responsible for the "ruthlessness and cruelty" of the Communist regime.

The Russian Revolution occurred in the midst of the First World War and set out to bring an end to this terrible conflict which had cost millions of lives. In a letter to the American people, Lenin wrote, "the international imperialist bourgeoisie have slaughtered 10 million men and maimed 20 million in their war … and will say these casualties are justified." He warned that these same imperialists would judge the casualties of the Russian Civil War to be "criminal" (Volume 28 of Lenin’s Collected Works).

Surely you must understand that this terrible situation had the effect of brutalising political life, irrespective the wishes of the individuals involved. The Bolsheviks, moreover, knew that the price of defeat was the slaughter of tens of thousands of workers and socialists. They had the example of the Paris Commune of 1871, which demonstrated how ruthlessly the ruling classes deal with a failed socialist uprising.

Lenin issued his August 11 order for a hundred kulaks to be executed in order to resume grain procurements and restore food supplies to the cities. This occurred in the midst of a desperate crisis in which millions were starving to death.

Five kulak districts had taken up arms against the revolution and the alliance of Western imperialist and White armies had plans to seize Yaroslavl, Nizhni-Novgorod, Tambov, Murom and Vorenezh so as to deny food to Moscow. That famine was the intended outcome of the military campaign is confirmed in the remarks of the French general Lavergne, who was active in the fighting. In the book The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow he is quoted as saying, "I shall feel guilty because, if our plan succeeds, the famine in Russia will be terrible."

In the consideration of great social struggles, are no distinctions to be made between the violence of the oppressors and the defensive violence of the oppressed? Is the struggle of Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War to abolish slavery to be equated with the fight of the Confederacy to maintain a whole people in chains?

The focus on Lenin's supposed violent character is used to reinforce the programme's conclusion that Lenin fell victim to the very methods and party machine he created. You say you are "genuinely puzzled" by my criticism of the film's treatment of the deteriorating relationship between Lenin and Stalin during Lenin's illness. You add that you are familiar with "Lenin's concern about the growth of bureaucratism and his alliance with Trotsky," but dismiss this as "old news."

Much of your documentary is "old news," which you claim to examine in a new light. Why do you consider the struggle of Trotsky and Lenin against the emerging Stalinist bureaucracy unworthy of such attention?

There is no other event in history—and I include the rise of fascism in Germany—in which the technique of the great lie has been used to such devastating effect. For the better part of the twentieth century the Stalinist bureaucracy equated its rule with communism and presented Stalin as Lenin's natural heir. This made it possible for the crimes of Stalin to be endlessly cited by anticommunists as proof of the supposed failure of socialism. In these circumstances, one should think very carefully before pronouncing as "old news" the socialist opposition to Stalin that was led by the greatest representatives of the Russian Revolution.

Finally, you cite favourably the comments of former Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, who solemnly declares: "Some people in our country have revised their judgement of Lenin solely on the basis of new documents that illustrate his brutality." I hope you are not so naive as to believe such nonsense.

A decade ago a career functionary like Yakovlev would have been praising Lenin, in accordance with the party line of Stalin’s heirs. The highly expedient "reappraisal" of Lenin by Yakovlev and so many other ex-apparatchiks is an example of old wine in new bottles. It goes hand in hand with the attempt to legitimise the restoration of capitalism and the accrual of great wealth by former Stalinist bureaucrats, who are benefiting directly and personally from the suffering of the Soviet people.

I look forward to your comments on these questions.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Marsden